The Syrian army was preparing an offensive on Thursday to retake the whole of Aleppo, as escalating fighting in the divided second city killed dozens of civilians in another blow to a tattered truce.

Nearly 200 people have been killed in Aleppo in the past week as rebels have pounded government-held neighborhoods with rocket and artillery fire and the regime has hit rebel areas with air raids.

A 2-year-old boy fatally shot his mother from the back seat of the car as she drove along a Milwaukee highway, sheriff's officials said Wednesday, less than two months after a Florida mother was shot and wounded in similar circumstances.

The Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office said Patrice Price, 26, of Milwaukee, died at the scene Tuesday morning.

A survey in 10 countries with significant Muslim populations, including Lebanon, found "striking" differences in the extent to which people believe the Quran should influence a nation's laws.

Possible reasons for these differences include a nation's history and religious composition as well as personal factors such as intensity of religious observance, age and level of education, said the Pew Research Center, which conducted the survey among more than 10,000 Muslims and non-Muslims a year ago. Error margins ranged from 3.4 to 4.3 percentage points.

McDonald's is testing Chicken McNuggets with no artificial preservatives as it works to revive its U.S. business.

The world's biggest hamburger chain says it began testing the new recipe in about 140 stores in Oregon and Washington in March.

Every time 3-year-old Seif wears his new prosthetic legs, the toddler puts up a fight. He has already made peace with walking on his stumps, but there is no dodging his daily rehabilitation session at a prosthetic clinic in southern Turkey.

In a small clinic in the dusty border town of Reyhanli, dozens of wounded Syrians come to be fitted each month with prosthetic limbs, their best shot at restoring a semblance of a normal life.

Japanese video-game maker Nintendo Co. reported a 24 billion yen ($216 million) loss for January-March Wednesday, bigger than the loss it reported the previous year.

Nintendo also said Wednesday that its new game platform codenamed NX will be launched globally in March next year. Some game fans had expected the machine might be shown at the annual E3 electronics show in Los Angeles in June.

Twitter gets lots of grief from investors because it hasn't taken over the world the way Facebook did, at least in terms of amassing users.

But maybe it's destined to stay small, serving a vital, if limited, role for the public. Maybe Twitter just isn't meant to be an all-encompassing social utility. Maybe stock price is not the only lens through which a company can be valued. Twitter, perhaps even in spite of its difficult interface and site-specific lingo, has become a cultural force since its 2006 founding.

Apple sold more than 51 million iPhones in the first three months of this year — and that's the problem.

That's 10 million fewer iPhones than the tech giant sold during the same quarter a year ago. As a result, Apple on Tuesday reported its first drop in quarterly revenue in 13 years — and the first-ever year-over-year decline in iPhone sales.

In the age of podcasts and streaming services, you might think pirate radio is low on the list of concerns of federal lawmakers and broadcasters. You'd be wrong.

They're increasingly worried about its presence in some cities as unlicensed broadcasters commandeer frequencies to play anything from Trinidadian dance music to Haitian call-in shows. And they complain the Federal Communications Commission can't keep up with the pirates, who can block listeners from favorite programs or emergency alerts for missing children and severe weather.

The Dutch marked their king's birthday Wednesday with an official celebration in the northeastern city of Zwolle and festivals and unofficial garage sales around the nation.

Numbers of revelers were expected to be lower than in previous years because of wintery temperatures and showers forecast to sweep over the country of 17 million.